


Eyes, which are for seeing

by grainjew



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Dr Nyarlathotep, Eyeballs, Gen, Humor, eldritch horrors being eldritchly horrifying but like they're also really stupid, i would willingly die in battle for 12 and bill's friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:08:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26208436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: The Doctor and Bill meet an eldritch horror on an alien planet, and Bill learns a few things about her tutor.
Relationships: The Doctor & Bill Potts
Comments: 28
Kudos: 115





	Eyes, which are for seeing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kagehana_tsukio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kagehana_tsukio/gifts).



> this is dedicated to tsu but i'd also like to thank my best friend for being an "ok but what is the eldritch horror actually DOING" sounding board. u were extremely helpful even if i just ended up going with the option that amused me most

"Okay, just _shut up,_ " said the Doctor. He was talking to a swarming mass of eyes that gave Bill a headache every time she looked at it, so instead she looked at him. "I'm the Doctor, hello, can we please _talk_ about this before you go on with your plan?"

The eyes made a horrible gurgling noise that speared right through Bill's mind. She bit her tongue to keep from screaming, because she was pretty sure that would be awful for diplomacy.

" _Thank_ you," said the Doctor. He gestured towards the doors of the TARDIS, and Bill watched as though his arm was moving in slow motion, or through syrup. "Now, you'll tell me why you were trying to force open the doors of my TARDIS."

A long string of more gurgling noises. Bill contemplated running away, but decided she would probably get lost, and then not only would she be lost on an alien planet in the far future but also she wouldn't get to see the Doctor reason with an eldritch horror.

The Doctor sighed sympathetically. "I'll do what I can. But—" he glanced over at Bill, who was trying her best to not look like a total wreck, "—do you mind compressing yourself down a little while we talk? Three dimensions are awfully limiting, I know, but I'm afraid I may have to be cross with you if you keep harming my student's mind."

The eyeballs managed to make gurgling sound surprised.

"Yes, her," snapped the Doctor. He put a hand on her shoulder in a way that was a little too clinical to be comforting. Bill decided she appreciated it nonetheless and tried to concentrate on the the hilarious way his eyebrows were furrowed because she could still see the eyeballs moving in the corner of her eye and she wanted, just a little bit, to throw up. "I'm quite fond of her, actually."

Gurgle, gurgle, horrifying mind-melting gurgle.

"She is not my _pet,_ " said the Doctor. "Nor is she _inconsequential._ Her name is Bill, and she is my student and my friend, and you, right now, are neither of those things." His anger bit at her like a winter wind, scouring away the yellow heat of this planet's twin suns. His voice kept staticking, too, as he spoke. She kept missing words. She was pretty sure that wasn't normal, but she was too busy trying to stay un-brain-melted to figure out if she'd ever noticed that happening before, or for that matter to feel warm about the Doctor defending her.

The eyeballs gurgled what she tentatively parsed as disbelief.

The Doctor made a sound somewhere between a frustrated wail and an irritated hiss. "Yes, even though she can't see beyond three dimensions. Believe it or not, not being a higher being does not make you irrelevant." He sighed his 'I am a longsuffering professor burdened with hordes of idiotic students' sigh. "Let me put this another way. If you cause her permanent harm, which is what will happen if you do not compress yourself within the next ten millispans of fourth-dimensional progression, I will ensure that you find yourself trapped in the blast radius of Skaro's sun as it becomes a time-locked supernova. Do I make myself clear?"

The gurgling this time was more rapid and high pitched, and felt like being stabbed in the brainstem with about a thousand needles. The mass of eyeballs wriggled, sort of, in a way that twisted Bill's vision in knots. With all her willpower, she focused on the velvet of the Doctor's ridiculous jacket and on the pain from biting her tongue.

_"Do I make myself clear?"_

Panicked, brain-stabbing gurgles, and then from the corner of her eye, Bill watched the eyeballs _schlorp_ together, taking on tangible form. Her headache receded, a bit. After a moment of that, she chanced a glance with most of her field of vision, and when she didn't die immediately or start screaming, she blinked.

Surprisingly, she was actually able to process the eyeballs with her brain now. They'd congealed into an awful lumpy puddle looking thing, like someone had left porridge with eyeballs in it out on the counter all day and then thrown it on the pavement when they came home from work and realized it was still sitting there, uneaten.

"You know," said the Doctor to the eyeball porridge, "I knew someone who looked a bit like that once. Called himself the Kro'ka. _Remarkably_ unpleasant creature, all things considered." Then he turned to Bill and grabbed both her shoulders in his hands and leaned down to look her right in the eye. She felt, suddenly, very, very safe. She felt very safe, and very protected, and like the Doctor was very, very present, and she felt the dregs of her headache trickling gently out of her conscious mind.

She should tell him to stop trying to mindwipe her without asking. This was the second time, just one more incident left to make it a habit.

She would tell him. Later. After... after.

Right now she was just glad she didn't feel like throwing up anymore.

"I'm sorry, Bill," he said, still staring at her with those too-icy blue eyes. She didn't look away, even though she could still see the dregs of that scouring, staticky anger underneath his ancientness and concern. "You shouldn't have had to experience that. Are you alright now?"

"Better," she said. Her voice was all shaky, but that wasn't a surprise. The suns beat down. A haze of dust hovered in the air, smoky. She glanced over at the eyeball porridge creature. "Better. What's up with eyeballs over there? You seemed to be about to help it, them, question mark, before you went all scary ancient Time Lord."

The Doctor made a face. "Eyeballs over there managed to get itself lost while, er," he tilted his head and made a short thinking noise, "grocery shopping, let's call it."

Eyeballs over there made an indignant sort of gurgle that only stabbed Bill in the brain a little bit. Bill congratulated herself on being able to somehow glean emotion out of eldritch gurgles.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Yes, _obviously_ that's not your name, but Bill can't exactly say—" he said something in that gurgling language that should _not_ have been able to come out of his throat, and that made Bill grab at her temples, "—so we'll be calling you Eyeballs for expediency." A pause. "Sorry about that, Bill." Another pause. "The TARDIS doesn't like to translate extradimensional languages if she can help it." A third pause, and then he spun around and pointed at Eyeballs. "And you need to talk on a frequency Bill can understand, got it? Three-dimensional, remember?"

 _I remember,_ said a sulky, gurgly sort of voice that appeared right in Bill's head without so much as a by-your-leave. Ok, telepathy. She could deal with that. Better than brain-stabbing gurgles. _Is this adequate, Magician?_

"Bill?" said the Doctor.

"Uh," she said, and then realized she was supposed to answer. "Yeah. Yeah, it's fine."

 _Better be,_ said Eyeballs. Under its sulkiness, it sounded more than a little afraid, which Bill had come to realize wasn't an _unusual_ reaction to the Doctor, but was definitely one that merited note when the person expressing it was an eldritch eyeball horror who thought humans were pets.

"Don't worry," she said. "Telepathy's chill."

Then she sat down, because that seemed appropriate considering her conversation partner was at most six inches tall. The ground was just as dusty as the air and the whole planet seemed to be, a wasteland of red all the way to the horizon. The Doctor had done one of his impressive topic veers partway through their tutoring session today and decided that actually, they were talking about rocks now, he knew just the planet. Apparently this place was supposed to have excellent rocks. Bill hadn't gotten to see them, because five minutes into their hike, Eyeballs had tried to break into the TARDIS and they'd had to go back. She wasn't very bothered. It was very hot here and she hadn't dressed for a hike, and the dust was _awful._

The Doctor sat down next to her, folding all his limbs under him like a weird bug. It was moments like this where she wasn't sure how many limbs he actually had, those little transitions in time when he was in motion and the integrity of the spacetime continuum seemed to unravel and reravel around him. She kept meaning to ask him about that, and about the way he sometimes seemed just a little out of phrase with the rest of the universe, like his eyes weren't really eyes, like she could see stars through them, or walk through his skin. But she kept forgetting.

The eyeballs in the porridge were swiveling between her and the Doctor. After a few moments of that awkwardness, Bill said, "So, grocery shopping?"

 _Hardly an accurate descriptor,_ said Eyeballs. It rolled its eyes, all like thirty of them. _I was harvesting energy from supernovas and stocking it in a small pocket dimension for later consumption._

"So, grocery shopping," said Bill, flatly this time. "And then you got lost?"

 _I did not!_ _I just ventured slightly too close to the event horizon and got myself flung the length and depth of your Web of Time._ The eyeballs were bouncing around the porridge, which would probably have been more sickening if Bill hadn't already done her quota of feeling like she was about to throw up for today. _I don't get lost, I am beyond your three-dimensional comprehension!_

"Okay," said Bill, "but you don't know where you are and you can't get home." She shared a glance with the Doctor and wondered whether this was a _teenaged_ eyeball monstrosity who'd been sent out on errands or something. It would match the arrogance and the attitude. "Alright, Eyeballs, do you have a cosmic zip code or something?"

"Bill, we've been over this," said the Doctor, which was totally hypocritical, because the only thing they'd been over was him eventually admitting that he did in fact need her zipcode to find her house.

But... "No, wait, back up just a second," said Bill, to nobody in particular. "Forget the zip code, do you even live in this _universe_? You have a pocket dimension, do you live in there?"

 _Obviously not_ , said Eyeballs. _I live in_ — The word slipped right through Bill's brain like a knife through butter, leaving her doubled over, hands to temples. Luckily the blinding headache passed as quickly as it came.

The Doctor glared at Eyeballs. Bill sat back up and tried to reset herself. Eyeballs shrank back, gloopily.

"Okay," said Bill. "Sure. That." She tried to remember her train of thought. "Um, that place. Wherever it is. Can you get to it through your pocket dimension?"

 _...yes?_ said Eyeballs. One of the eyeballs in its porridge underwent mitosis in confusion, leaving two equally shiny but smaller eyeballs.

"Cool," said Bill, a little bit about the eyeball mitosis. "So, how... do you _get_ to the pocket dimension?"

She felt a little like she was teaching math to a middle schooler, or at least she assumed middle school math teachers felt this way, with all the explaining the problem in questions until the solution that really should have been obvious in the first place crossed the student's brain. At least, the mythical good middle school math teachers who actually sort of cared. Oh no, was this what it was like for the Doctor when he was teaching her? Hopefully she was slightly less excruciating to walk through problems. Hopefully.

The Doctor caught her eye and smiled slightly, but didn't say anything, so she had to be doing _something_ right.

 _Oh,_ said Eyeballs, _schlorp_ ing into a different shape, _that's easy, like this._

Bill didn't look away in time.

Somehow, Eyeballs twisted shape until it had twenty limbs that were not at all limbs or real but couldn't be anything else, and no coherent form or physicality or visual anchor beyond twelve hundred eyeballs hanging sourceless and inside out in the air and flickering, and, and, and Bill's vision was filled with spots, and her throat was trying to escape into her mouth, and her limbs lost their substance, and Eyeballs did _something_ to the air that made it twist inside out and around and impossible and Bill threw up in her mouth and-- Eyeballs was gone.

Bill breathed. Bill breathed, and screwed her eyes shut, and tried not to think about how gross her mouth tasted, and sat on the ground, and breathed.

A hand on her shoulder. The Doctor. He said, "Bill," and she grounded herself in his voice, in his touch. Felt herself calm, her body set itself to rights. Breathed out. Opened her eyes.

The Doctor was staring at her in concern, frowning in the way that only emphasized the pointiness of his face a little bit.

"Doctor," she said, and her voice was only mostly shaky. "It's gone?"

"It's gone," he assured, voice soft, and it occurred to Bill in an absent, disconnected sort of way that he really was like a grandfather. Then his hand tighted on her shoulder, and he said, urgent: "Close your eyes again, Bill."

She closed her eyes.

There was a sickening wrench she felt in her ears and her gut, and then a waterfall of Eyeballs's eldritch gurgling.

The Doctor shifted his weight, but kept his hand on her shoulder, and she kept her eyes closed. He said, "Frequency she can understand, remember?"

 _Ah yes,_ said Eyeballs, understandably this time. _I have discovered that I can get home through my pocket dimension!_

"Oh, good," said Bill. She should probably have been a bit more enthusiastic, but it was a bit difficult to manage enthusiasm when you were also trying really hard to not look at the person you were talking to so that your brain wouldn't crack like an egg.

Eyeballs made what Bill presumed were the noises of an extradimensional eyeball horror shuffling awkwardly back and forth.

"And what do you say to the person who just helped you out?" asked the Doctor, which nearly set Bill laughing.

Eyeballs shuffled some more. Bill tried to contain her smile. Finally, like it was being tugged out of it on a string, Eyeballs said: _...Thank you._

"You're welcome," said Bill, mouth twitching. "Good luck getting home."

 _I don't need luck,_ grumbled Eyeballs. And then the world distended again, and then there was just Bill, and the Doctor, and the wind, and the dust.

Bill blinked her eyes open, scrubbing at them with her fists, and finally let the laugh she'd been suppressing out of her lungs. The Doctor took his hand off her shoulder and leaned back, so she followed his eyes up to the sky. One of the suns was setting, streaking greens and oranges across the horizon. There was no trace of Eyeballs left, not even a splotch in the red dust where its porridge-body had flopped. Bill added that to the "that's unsettling" column in her brain and moved on, because the "that's unsettling" column was getting very long.

"So, that was definitely a teenager," she said. "An eldritch horror eyeball teenager."

The Doctor nodded. "Reminds me of my youth." There was a small, nostalgic smile on his lips.

"You had a youth?" said Bill, before she could stop herself.

He huffed. "Everyone had a youth." He paused. "Okay, most people had a youth. Like seventy five percent of people had a youth, that's most people. Bill," he said, in a totally different tone, "very well done just now. That was admirably handled."

The sunset was yellowing, bleeding into itself. The second sun was still three-in-the-afternoon high, and the sky was clear. "Oh," said Bill. "Thank you. And, um, thanks for making sure my brain didn't disintegrate."

"I could hardly let my star pupil's brain get disintegrated," concurred the Doctor, and he sounded so proud, and suddenly all the pain from earlier was worth it, because Bill wanted to remember this moment, the two of them sitting on an alien planet she couldn't even name, one of the only authority figures who'd ever properly mattered to her complimenting her with total sincerity, forever.

Some bird-adjacent creature, the first instance of local wildlife Bill had seen all day, made a black line in the sky, cutting through the dust.

"So, uh, Doctor?" Bill twisted her head around and stared him square in the very not-existentially-horrifying face. "You're also really some kind of eldritch horror it would make me explode to look at, right?"

"Well..." said the Doctor. His eyebrows made a V and his mouth made a squiggly line. "Uh, maybe?"

"Cool," said Bill. "I appreciate the not exploding."

And, shadows long, they went to go look at rocks.

**Author's Note:**

> you can tell this is a doctor who story because it could totally be filmed in a quarry


End file.
